Daniel Danger has teamed up with Static Medium to release an art print version of one of his most popular recent paintings. “And I’ll only feel smaller and smaller” is a 30″ x 40″ giclee print that will cost $200. It will be sold as a timed-edition for 48 hours. There will also be a 36″ x 48″ version on wood with an edition of 25 for $600. These go up Saturday, March 15th at 12pm Pacific Time. Visit StaticMedium.com.

It’s a giclee because the artist, Daniel, specifically explained that the painting couldn’t be properly reproduced as a screen print. In order for detail not to be lost it had to be a giclee.

Giclee prints are also more expensive to produce than screenprints, especially at such a large size. The vast majority of screen printers don’t even have the equipment necessary to produce a 30” x 40” image.

1st: GOOD giclee printing is not cheap. GIGANTIC giclee printing is even more expensive doing all of it properly.

Second: The entire reason they are doing it giclee as they said was there was no way to recreate the image and keep it looking like the original doing it as a screenprint. If it could be screened and come out in the wanted quality, im sure they would. Some people hate giclee printing, but it has a place to recreate pieces like this.

im not saying this to be snappy, im saying this in a “lets talk shop for a bit” manner. but this would be a literal nightmare to screenprint. like, an absolute living day in and day out technical nightmare whos traumatic memory would haunt my every waking moment for years to come. i knew an hour into it that it wasnt even an option.

size alone, if a print was going to be made, it should be as close to the original size as possible. the piece works best sort of engulfing, it should dominate a wall. its a piece about the open universe making you feel increasingly smaller. 18×24 aint gonna do the job. the original was drawn 36×48″, my intent (the biggest board i could buy), so instantly that rules out every screenprint shop ive worked with (D&L sold their XL presses a few years ago) on press size alone. so id be trusting a huge technical job to a stranger.

as for the image itself. its a full tonal image, in that there is a full range of greyscale throughout. there is no isolated key plate (just the black lineart) to make clean seps from (only the large format photo SM took). a full tonal image would generally be printable (though via accepting a detail loss) by stacking dot gradient separations (as ive done in the past). works best if the tonal shifts have a decent amount of real estate to work in. but almost every tiny tiny line on this thing has sort of a tiny “glow” to it. its running that full tonal change from black to white in a fraction of an inch around the line. what that would translate to with silkscreenable stacked dot gradients is “the line would look fuzzy.” …and the piece is entirely tiny lines. it would be a print of 190dpi fuzzy lines. that, and all the tiny house etching/drawing is drawn tighter than usual than what i would typically scan for key plates, on the full 36×48″ panel. so there would be no shrinking the image to make a smaller screenprint. those details would simply be unprintable.

registration wise, to do this print as a full size screenprint, i would have to lineup perfectly a series of layers containing identical tiny fine lines. that is hard on a small print. hell, thats hard to even print FILMS for. the paper alignment being off a tiny fraction of an inch, or the screen pulling the slightest amount in the middle where the tension is less, and it would be out. print ruined. plus on a 36×48″ print, the ink coverage alone would warp the paper, making registration a further nightmare.

so when SM approached me and said “we can reproduce this exactly, full size, in an archival manner that can go right on a wall and make the same visual impact as the one in the gallery did” i said “do it.” dont get me wrong, im a screenprint guy through and through, but that route would have led to an oversized fuzzy print with questionable registration and noticeable detail loss printed by an unknown printer that would still cost hundreds of dollars. this is one of the best fine art printing companies out there right now, i toured their shop and was really impressed, look at their client list. crunch some numbers on high end printing like this for a piece this big (plus framing, plus the mounting) and youll figure out the production costs are over half the retail.

like i said, its not a casual purchase. it cant be. but im really excited for the people who are gonna invest in these to put them in their homes.

ok, back to anchorman 2 and signing a bazillion “please dont worry” prints.

Would you prefer he lose money on the prints? Shit, the guy needs to make a living. And im sorry, 200 bucks isnt catering to the rich. Chances are if you are in this hobby you could lay off a few random prints and instead have picked this one up that is going to be massive and look incredible.